- Glenn presented the Paperwork project & Wyn screened film.
- Glenn presented the Creole project and the moire metaphor & Wyn presented Continental Drift.
Comments by Alexis...
Re the jump as user language: it can be seen as a literal representation of suspension, but literalism is all that asylum seekers have. There is the signifier and signified. The asylum seeker operates at the level of basic survival. Migrants don't have the luxury of dealing with anything beyond the signifier. Migrants are called back to the level of singnifiers.
Signifier/signified are notions attached to a binary system of representation. In the context of migration so is inside/outside.
A new situation demands a new rhetoric, a rhetoric that blurs the boundaries of binaries. In the 1980s we had structuralism; in the 1990s, deconstructionism; but now we don't have any script anymore. We have signifiers and we don't know what they signify, the beginnings of a new language. Alexis likes Paperwork because it represents a mediation between academia and the realities of the world. It doesn't project an ideology. A user language is only applicable to a particular situation, it does not claim to go beyond that. Libraries are cemeteries of user language, while cyber space is the exact opposite to a library. It is no accident that the notion of moire is developed by Glenn, an artist who fully embraces digital methods.
Alexis read out the Wikipedia quote on the history of the word moire' ... to everyone's great amusement! The moire metaphor can help undermine the ideology of purity that one finds within translation theory (purity of source language/purity of target language). No reality of the word, but only the trajectory of the word. Moire can an undermine the regime of object/image, and replace it with the notion of tapestry.
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